Want to share my newborn’s hospital costs

A lot of us plan to have babies in near or far future, and it's often a guess on how much it costs. I track my expenses, so I'm planning to update how major costs associated with my baby are coming along over the years. To start, here's what it cost to welcome the baby to this world.

For context, we got blessed with a baby recently. We live in a Tier-1 city and took a delivery package from Cloudnine, one of chain hospitals specialising in pregnancy, neonatalogy and paediatrics. The hospital was also barely 10 mins drive from our place, which helped our peace of mind in case of emergency and hence was a big factor in preferring it over other similar options.

The package cost they quoted was 1.2 lakhs + 40 thousand exclusions. The exclusions are costs that can vary (like medicine, pharmacy etc), so that was a best guess. The 1.2 lakh included 3 days hospital room, delivery (both natural and c-section were included, doctor's consulting and visit during our admission, nursing charges etc. )

This estimate was actually remarkably close to what they ended up charging (1.63 lakhs).

However, we had an unseen and unfortunate complication post partum and our baby was admitted to NICU for 6 days (all good now). This obviously wasn't part of any previous estimates. NICU rent, pharmacy, battery of medical tests, medicine, pharmacy, equipment, doctor and nursing charges all combined to a further 1.61 lakh cost.

So all in all our total hospital expense came around 3.24 lakhs.

This doesn't include all the doctors consultations, scans and medical tests that happened in the nine months leading up to the delivery. I can compile those numbers of anyone's I terested, but it is in ballpark of ₹40,000.

Obviously, this is all hospital and medical cost and doesn't account for all the clothes, toys etc.

Note: I was notified that the package costs have been increased by ₹40k for new bookings.

Feel free to AMA.